Strip HTML Tags
Strip out all HTML tags from text and return plain text only.
💡 Common Use Cases
- Extract plain text from web pages
- Clean up HTML emails for text editors
- Process web scraped content
- Prepare content for print or plain text export
Convert HTML to clean plain text — strip every tag in one pass
HTML is the language of the web, but a lot of the time you want only what is inside the tags, not the tags themselves. Copy-pasting from a website, exporting a blog post, scraping a product description, processing an email body, or cleaning a database field — every one of these situations produces text peppered with <p>, <div>, <a href="..."> and the rest of the markup zoo. This Strip HTML Tags tool removes every tag while preserving the actual content.
How to use it
Paste your HTML into the editor. Choose your options: preserve line breaks (recommended for readability) or collapse to one line, keep link URLs as plain text or discard them entirely, decode HTML entities (turn & into &, < into <, etc.) or keep them encoded. Click Strip. The clean plain text appears in the output area, ready to copy.
What this tool removes and keeps
Removed: all opening, closing, and self-closing HTML tags, including <p>, <div>, <span>, <a>, <img>, headings, list items, table cells, and everything else. Also removed: the entire contents of <script> and <style> tags, because their content is JavaScript or CSS, not human-readable text. HTML comments (<!-- ... -->) are stripped as well.
Kept: the text content of every tag (the words between <p> and </p>, etc.), and HTML entities can optionally be decoded back to their original characters. Line breaks are preserved by converting block-level tag boundaries (paragraphs, divs, headings, list items) into newlines, so the output reads like real text instead of being mashed into a single paragraph.
Common uses
Cleaning content for re-publication. When you copy a blog post or article from one CMS to paste into another, the formatting tags from the source platform often clash with the target's editor. Stripping them and then re-applying basic formatting in the new editor produces a much cleaner result.
Extracting text for analysis. Sentiment analysis, keyword extraction, language detection, and other NLP tasks operate on plain text. HTML markup is noise that needs to be removed before processing.
Email-to-text conversion. HTML emails are full of formatting markup. Stripping it gives you the actual message body — useful for archiving, quoting, or feeding into a text-based tool.
Database field cleanup. User-generated content often comes with surprising amounts of HTML — even in fields that should be plain text. Stripping tags before storage prevents display bugs and XSS risks downstream.
Generating meta descriptions. SEO meta descriptions and Open Graph descriptions should be plain text. If you are auto-generating them from the body of an article, stripping HTML is a required step.
Plain-text alternates for HTML emails. Good email practice is to send both an HTML version and a plain-text alternate. Stripping the HTML automatically creates a usable plain-text fallback.
Voice synthesis and screen readers. Text-to-speech and accessibility tools work better with clean plain text. Stripping HTML before passing content to a TTS engine produces more natural-sounding output.
Word counts for actual content. If you measure word count on raw HTML, the tag names inflate the result. Strip the tags first to get an accurate count of human-readable words.
HTML entities vs. tags
HTML entities like &, <, >, are not tags — they are encoded representations of single characters (&, <, >, non-breaking space). The tool offers a separate option to decode these entities. If you are converting HTML to text intended for human reading, decode them. If you are converting HTML to text intended for further HTML-aware processing, leave them encoded.
What this tool does not do
It does not render Markdown. If your source is Markdown, you do not need to strip anything — it is already plain text with some special characters. It also does not extract structured data; if you need to pull just the links, just the headings, or just the images, you will need a dedicated HTML parser. This tool is a one-pass plain-text extractor, optimised for speed and simplicity.
Privacy
HTML stripping runs entirely in your browser, using built-in JavaScript DOM parsing. No upload, no storage, no logging. Safe for proprietary content, customer data, internal communications, and anything else that should not leave your machine.